If you justify personally giving more time, energy and resource toward your own leisure and entertainment than to helping others or looking for problems to solve near or far, or rebuilding yourself to be capable of no less, you do get the society you contribute to. Presently we’re more junk-piles than islands.
In their way Americans are their own stereotypical artist, always casually forgetting their dreams cannot come to be without the sacrifice of others, but finding no obligation for role reversal and awarding their own time and space and energy and attentions and money for the more immediate benefit of less fortunate others who presumably have no dreams of their own regardless, because why? They want it more, deserve it more? How old are they? This isn’t a political or religious thing, it should be a common sense thing. I’ve never communicated with an American less hypocritical than their government. Personal histories being re-edited and re-written repetitiously is a huge pet peeve of mine. I accepted years ago I’ll never get to share a kiss again with a nice lady, because what remained of my teeth were that bad into trenchmouth territory. It’s not shame to voice that, it’s honesty. I drank and fought and worked my way through my 20s in manners that aged me 30 years, I am not a used car salesman, and humility has never in recorded history hurt anyone. But I always had priorities other than self-enrichment or self-care, and I was never to be more than a corpse, not when others have so much more to lose still. Going without love or friendship is the least of anyone’s troubles.
The biggest ego begins and ends as the smallest of people. Not the broken people, not the defeated people, the ones with nothing worth offering the universe. But just as the ultimate crime or sin of god was creating the potential for evil in the first of his archangels manifested before the heavens or the Earth, the very one who would fall, the ultimate crime or sin of humanity is how the first act of every consciousness is setting its ego forth.